GitLab Terraform Provider: Some data and a little success
This issue aims to give "some" insight into how the GitLab Terraform Provider was revived and how we successfully migrated (so far) it from GitHub to GitLab. A lot of us put considerable effort into that and it has been a little success story and "stories need to be told"
Disclaimer: I tell this story from my point of view, so bear with me if I'm missing details. Also, shoutout to the folks who cared for the provider even before last year, it's the foundation we've built upon - thanks!
Early 2022
Beginning of 2022 there were quite some pending Pull Requests and burning Issues in the provider, but almost no one had the bandwidth to support these contributions. As you can see in graph below, not much was going on in terms of accepted contributions in the provider at all:
At the time I've reached out to @nagyv-gitlab (who, if I got this correctly, only recently joined the project as PM from GitLab side) and @armsnyder (who was pretty much the sole maintainer left with all the work) and asked if I can help maintain the project and after a few discussions and a mundane "Would you be interested in being added as a collaborator?" from Adam, I got maintainer permissions.
During 2022
Together with Adam, we were able to quickly resolve the most pressing issues and merge some long overdue Pull Requests and shortly after even releasing our first provider release.
Since then we've 1:
- published 16 Provider Releases
- merged / closed ~400 Pull Requests
- welcomed ~80 individual contributors since (none of which were GitLab Team Members by then)
- welcomed @PatrickRice and @joseph3262 as Developers
- served the provider ~5 Million times to end users from the Terraform registry
- had a handful of community hours
- contributed over 30 improvements (mostly REST API endpoints) to GitLab itself (others may have too!).
And I guess the upwards trend of activity on the provider by looking at the contribution graph speaks for itself:
Migration to GitLab
A few days ago we've "completed" the migration to GitLab.com - after all it's a provider for GitLab and therefore pretty much it's "natural" home
To me, the goal going forward is clear:
- continue delivering features and improvements in the provider
- welcome more contributions from more community contributors, but also from GitLab Team Members (from the Configure group, but also hopefully from the wider GitLab organization)
- foster the community, be it daily on our Discord or monthly in our Community Hour
... and who is using the provider?
I think it makes sense to learn more about that!
What I know so far:
- the provider was downloaded over 5 million times from the registry over last year
- not really sure how that relates to the individual user count
🤔
- not really sure how that relates to the individual user count
-
@nagyv-gitlab once stated that ~8% of API traffic on gitlab.com comes from the provider
- ... I'm really curious how many self-managed instances benefit from the provider!
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@nagyv-gitlab I'd love to get an up-to-date and maybe historical numbers for that - maybe you can help me out here
😄
I would also be interesting to know who, if anyone, inside GitLab is using the provider for their own needs and maybe also identify potential to dogfood it more where it makes sense.
So what ...
... I think it's interesting to see a project evolve and see it gain attention and have success - so there we have it written-up
I'll try to keep this issue up to date with the progress we make with the provider on GitLab.com, contributions and the community
❤
Thanks A huge thanks to @nagyv-gitlab @nmezzopera @armsnyder @PatrickRice to help so much with provider work!! It's been a nice ride, thank you
Footnotes
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This CSV is the dataset I've pulled from the GitHub Pull Request API and from which I concluded the numbers: terraform_gitlab_provider_pr_dataset.csv
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